New Aberdeen Group report highlights a common misconception in the SME market place that small to medium sized organisations are simply too small for ERP.

Modern ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions have come a long way and adapted with the marketplace to lower many of the barriers for smaller organisations. With new flexible cloud deployment options and monthly subscription plans with solutions such as Sage 200, ERP is as accessible and available to growing businesses as ever.

Every business undergoes a journey to reach ever moving targets and goals. Some businesses may go through a more direct path with rapid growth and others may have to take the more scenic route by trialling many different paths to reach the road for growth.

No matter which route you take as your business grows you are going to face numerous challenges, such as finding new staff, moving to bigger offices, perhaps even international expansions?

With more staff and more departmental functions such as marketing and customer service your business is going to adopt numerous software applications to facilitate delivery of key service areas.

The issue of running multiple applications that run independently and cannot bring all the data back into one central hub is that departments and employee communication and collaboration are going to be stretched by further business growth, with staff spending more time on data collection tasks rather than acting upon data analysis.

Aberdeen Group Report – To ERP or Not to ERP? Highlights interesting findings and complications for those growing businesses without ERP:

- Eighty-nine percent (89%) of midmarket organizations without ERP indicate that they cannot track business processes.

- Eighty three percent (83%) state that business systems cannot interact with one another.

- Business partners may not take organizations without ERP seriously when working together if they feel that the organization without ERP is unorganized.

Interestingly enough when these complications of organisations without ERP are contrasted with the findings for those organisations with ERP there is a strong evidence to support the move for ERP adoption in growing businesses. Especially when you consider 1 in 4 businesses are looking to invest in modern ERP this year (Source: Forrester Research)

48% of Businesses already using ERP reported greater ability for real time visibility into the status of all processes in comparison to only 6% of those without ERP. Similarly those organisations with ERP were 48% likely to be able to report and share data across the organisation compared to only 6% without ERP.

Enterprise Resource Planning solutions such as Sage 200 and Sage 300 ERP integrate Accounts with Customer relationship management and Business Intelligence, to facilitate the successful business growth cycle by acting as a central hub for the enterprise, collecting key data and delivering actionable analytics for corporate objectives.

For more information on ERP systems or to discuss your business requirements contact Oakley on 01268 724005.